House of Cards
by VeronicaBarnes
Summary: The guilt from Julian's lies about Ric weigh heavily on him. One shot - for now.


He watched her sleeping. Her head on his chest, her left leg draped over his legs. He could stay like this forever, in this space, Alexis in his arms. Her bedroom had become his sanctuary. A sanctuary he knew would be gone once the house of cards he built with his lies collapsed under the weight of those lies.

The familiar dread that was always like a punch to the stomach and heart hit him, and he could only hope when his lies were revealed she would eventually come to understand why he told them. He could only hope that one day she would understand why he had broken her heart when he had broken Molly's heart with his lies about Ric.

He hadn't realized how empty his life was until he found them. A year ago he was blissfully ignorant of how much he could love someone. Unaware that there were people in this world he would walk through fire for, people he would sell his soul to insure their safety.

He swallowed against the lump in his throat when he thought about Molly. He hadn't taken her into consideration when he agreed to Luke's terms. He wondered, for what seemed like the hundredth time in the past hour, why he hadn't just killed Luke. He should have realized, after Luke at first refused, then accepted his "resignation" that his family wasn't safe. He gladly go prison for killing Luke if he could go back in time and handle Luke on that dock. Shooting him and kicking him into the harbor would have been the way the old Julian Jerome had handled it. That is how Julian Jerome in 1990 would have handled it. It was such a cliché, but Alexis, Sam, Danny, and Lucas had made him want to be a better man. He had tried, but look where it had gotten his son.

But if he was going to go back in time, he would go back a lot further than a couple of weeks ago. He would go back to that night in Hanover, New Hampshire, when he first met the woman now sleeping soundly in his arms. Even at the age of 19, he had known then she was special and that she would change his life. He had no idea that night that it would take 34 years to find her again.

He had tried to find her to see her again. He had gone back to that bar. He had parked his Camaro outside the gates of that damned prison-like boarding school hoping to spot her, hoping she would see him. Eventually he moved on, graduated from Dartmouth and gone on to New York and graduate school where he had met Cheryl.

He hadn't known he had gotten Alexis pregnant when he had taken her virginity in the back of that car. He had left her pregnant, alone, and scared. If he had known, the past three and half decades would have been different for all of them. He and Alexis would have gotten married. That's just how things were done in his circle in 1979. As soon as his parents found out they were going to be grandparents, they wouldn't have fought him on it, in fact, they would have insisted on it. He had already been half in love with her before he had gotten her in his backseat, and with the way they felt about each other now, he had no doubt that they would have fallen in love with each other before Sam was born, and they would have raised her together.

From what he was able to find out about the Cassadines, Mikkos would have gladly let his 16-year-old daughter go to get her and her daughter away from Helena and her wrath, and to make sure the family was not "shamed" by his pregnant, unmarried 16-year-old daughter. Alexis said one night after too much Scotch that she believed Mikkos had done what he had done to try to protect Alexis and Sam from his sociopathic wife. Sam and Alexis had both suffered for decades because of Mikkos Cassadine's twisted version of fatherly love. Alexis hadn't even known she was his daughter until she was an adult.

Alexis snuggled closer to him in her sleep, and he moved to kiss the top of her head, squeezing her tighter. He wondered how much longer he had. How many more nights he would spend in her bed, making love to her? How much longer until it all fell apart and he was back to his lonely, soul sucking existence? Would Lucas and Sam, reject him as he knew Alexis would? He hoped when the truth came out, she would remember the little things he had done to try to show her how thankful he was that she had come back into his life, that they had been reunited.

He made it a point to make sure she had fresh gardenias weekly – delivered to her office on Monday morning, delivered to the house on Saturday. He wanted to spoil her, spoil them all before his house of cards collapsed. She finally believed that he remembered she smelled like gardenias the night they met, the night their daughter was conceived. After that night in Hanover, he had never been able to smell gardenias without thinking of that girl and wondering what had become of her. He hoped when the truth came out that she wouldn't doubt that, or that he loved her.

Tears stung his eyes as he realized again that he still had not said those words to her. He had been stunned when she said them to him at the hospital after he had been released from jail. Luke's threats to her and to their family had been playing on a loop in his head when she walked off that elevator and into his arms.

He had been trying to show her how much he loved her so that when he told her, she wasn't surprised and didn't get scared. He had all but told her, and had decided that after their family dinner at the Gallery, when she knew he had quit the business, he could say the words and she would not be able to doubt it. His plan was to tell her when they got back to her bedroom, and then he would show her just how much.

But Luke was not going to let him out of the business without a fight, Lucas had been shot, Julian had been arrested, and she had surprised him, and he would guess, herself too, by saying it first. Trying to get him to realize, he imagined, how much there was to lose if he went back to work for his boss. Maybe she didn't realize that to keep them safe and alive, he would do whatever it took, even if whatever it took meant they would all hate him. Or maybe deep in her heart and soul, she did know.

Now there were the lies he had told. He debated with himself constantly, should he tell her he loved her now when there were such huge lies between them? Or should he wait until the house of cards collapsed and she was railing at him for hurting Molly and for lying to her?

Lucas was in General Hospital because of the choices his father had made before he knew Lucas existed. The feel of a weight on his chest when he saw Lucas in that bed, Luke beside him, squeezing that ventilator tube, trying to kill him, still gripped him with fear. Luke's sister had raised Lucas, named the boy after her beloved brother. Luke was his uncle, so the callousness in which Luke thought about Lucas's life and what it would do to Bobbie to lose her son, had been an eye-opener to Julian. Now knowing Luke had killed his own grandson while driving drunk and seemingly shrugged it off since the boy was not biologically related to him, had sickened Julian. Julian had aligned himself with someone truly evil.

He was brought out of his thoughts when Alexis stirred and placed a kiss on his chest. She looked up, grinned at him, and began kissing down his torso. They never made love just once. When he started spending the night, they would fall asleep after making love, but one of them would always wake the other up with a light kiss, which always led them to make love again. In their 50s, they were grandparents, and they couldn't get enough of each other. He moved and in one fluid motion they were both sitting up, Alexis straddling him. He wanted to look into her eyes, he wanted to make sure she saw the love he felt for her in his eyes.

He hadn't been there to protect Alexis in 1979, but he was here now, in this house of cards built on a foundation of love and lies.


End file.
